A traditional computer is equipped with a desktop confined to the size of the monitors attached to the computer. The computer desktop is organized in layers of objects—typically referred to as windows, applications or widgets. The lowest layer of the desktop contains a background image, and on top of that icons or shortcuts used to start applications that will render themselves as layered windows.
Such layering of objects is a natural way to extend the use of the computer to do more than one thing at a time, and to quickly jump between tasks. However it only works well when the number of objects is fairly small. Once a larger number of objects are running, then the task of finding the object becomes quite complicated, since the user has to shuffle through the stack of objects.
Previous approaches have tried to simplify the search for an object of interest by providing, e.g., a preview of the object when the user hovers their mouse over the object icon, or when the number of active objects are presented in preview thumbnails on a task-list. However, the growing number of tasks solved with computers call for an ever-growing number of objects, and thus a better way to arrange objects on a desktop is needed.